@Barry Wallis I banished all Adobe products from my PC a decade ago or so when
@Steve first mentioned Sumatra PDF or Foxit PDF (don't remember which). Considering the hot mess of security updates they're coming up with every month, no, I don't trust Adobe at all. Having said that, I don't just download anything I see on the net. But, if something has a strong trend of positive reviews on YouTube and on relevant forums (mobileread in this case), then I might try it. I trust small sincere developers to try to maintain the core features of their product without a decade of feature bloat and trying to put everything but the kitchen sink in the program. Also, small niche programs like these probably are not as big a target for attack as Adobe. I also don't like Adobe's rent software forever model. And Adobe products tend to take lots of disk space. Of course, I virus scan anything before installing. No offense to anyone who uses Adobe.
YAY! I have it working, at least good enough for my purposes. Unfortunately, I couldn't get anything to work with the old version of Calibre as far as text to speech but I could still use the program for managing Ebooks if I want. I actually do almost everything on audio.
I downloaded and installed the Microsoft Speech Platform from Microsoft as well as a few English voices. Funny thing happened that MS showed two files named SpeechPlatformRuntime.msi so I installed the larger one. I couldn't find any evidence that I'd done anything.
After reading / viewing a number of positive articles or videos about Balabolka, I decided to give it a try. I downloaded from the following which seems to be the official site. I think the one I linked to before has the same content.
Balabolka is a text-to-speech application (freeware)
www.cross-plus-a.com
I reinstalled the SpeechPlatformRuntime.msi from the Balabolka site. After this, the voices I'd already installed from MS showed up in the Balabolka menu system. I was now able to convert text to speech with pretty good fidelity. The website says you can also get other professional voices from a few sources that sound better.
I loaded a PDF of a magazine. The narrow columns of the magazine came in as short lines with annoying pauses after each. I discovered that I had to turn on a function to "format" text for speech reading. This took a while to figure out.
You go to options / settings / text, and turn on:
* format text when file is opened
* format pasted text
* format text before reading clipboard aloud
Then save the settings. That got rid of the annoying pauses and provides a very passable speech output that I can use. Some of the voices still sound robotic, but definitely good enough for free.
I've attached a snippet of the system reading from a Python book I have. It converted the whole book to MP3. Then I brought that into Audacity and cut out a snippet, and reconverted to MP3. So, the actual sound I have here might be better than this sample. Some of the voices sound a bit better as well, but I like the accent of the one I'm using.
PS after reading the Balabolka faq in the help, it appears that I had to install the 32 bit speech platform as well as the 64 bit one. This is apparently what I did in a round about way to get it to work.
So, I have a solution. It's a bit awkward but is usable. If anyone else has experience with this feel free to share.
May your bits be stable and your interfaces be fast.
Ron
